Don’t Call Toronto’s Van Massacre “Misogynistic” and Here’s Why

At first, because the “van” is so often lone-wolf jihadism’s preferred agent for carnage, many Canadians assumed the Monday’s sidewalk massacre in Toronto’s Yonge-Finch corridor was an act of terrorism.

Within 24 hours, enough details had been released about the suspect, 25-year old Alek Minassian, to dispel that idea.

This was clearly a disturbed individual attempting to exorcize private demons in a final act of dramatic violence, as tragically consequential as possible with the only weapon of mass destruction available to him.

In Facebook postings, Minassian, who is afflicted with what is apparently a severe form of Asperger’s syndrome – high school classmates remembered him as subject to strange tics and a compulsion to act out cat behaviour like meowing and biting – identified himself as an “incel,” a sobriquet for “involuntarily celibate.”

Young men who call themselves incels feel, and doubtless are, sexually rejected by women who in reality are put off by their weirdness, but whose rejection is interpreted as a deliberate and even sadistic form of humiliation.

Minassian referred to “supreme gentleman” Elliot Rodgers in one Facebook post. This is an epithet 22-year old Rodger, who in 2014 killed six people and injured many more during a shooting rampage in Isla Vista, California, applied to himself.

Rodger, who killed himself after his bloody spree, is credited with turning chronic sexual rejection amongst disaffected young men into the raison d’être for an online forum.

A martyr figure to followers like Minassian, he created a manifesto and a video to articulate his grievances, which fascinate and inspire self-pitying you